As Silicon Valley’s security sector grows, Fortinet is looking to stand out from the crop of young upstarts and challenge industry leader Cisco Systems by selling its own hardware, with help from a local pioneer in Wi-Fi networking.

Fortinet and Meru Networks announced an acquisition agreement Wednesday that values Meru at $44 million, with Fortinet committing to pay $1.63 a share in cash for its Sunnyvale neighbor. Fortinet also debuted a new subscription service aimed at companies that allow employees to provide their own mobile devices and connect to their networks, which the hardware and software knowledge acquired in Wednesday’s deal could boost.

“It’s a wireless, mobile world, and security is obviously becoming more important,” John Whittle, vice president of corporate development and general counsel at Fortinet, said Wednesday in an interview. “With this convergence between Wi-Fi and security, we have the security products, they have the wireless products, and we can bring those together.”

Most of Silicon Valley’s new wave of network security companies focus on software to fight and detect threats, while working with hardware partners. Cisco has managed to take the most market share in a heavily fragmented industry by combining cloud-focused wireless networking products from its $1.2 billion purchase of Meraki with security solutions acquired with Sourcefire for $2.7 billion. Hewlett-Packard mimicked that move this year, buying Voltage Security and Sunnyvale-based Aruba Networks while prepping an enterprise-focused company.

“Fortinet may be much smaller than Cisco, but they can definitely be heard in the marketplace,” IDC analyst Nolan Greene said.

Fortinet has attempted to find a sweet spot between Cisco and its younger rivals. Greene, a networking research analyst, noted that the company began selling hardware a couple years ago, and describes their current offerings as “fairly robust” and improving with its Meru purchase.

“This was a fortuitous opportunity for them to find a company that was able to be bought at a discount, that has a fairly well-established brand and a longtime customer base,” Greene said.

Meru is the last company still pitching a single-channel architecture for wireless networks, Greene said, and brings a wealth of research and development experience as well as patents. The 13-year-old company has a customer base that is heavy on health care and education, where the dangers of the bring-your-own device trend can be multiplied.

“Without knowing where the device has been when its not on your premises, there’s risk from what that device can be exposed to,” Greene explained. “If there’s any opening on a network, any vulnerability, it can introduce malware, bots, all kinds of ugly stuff onto the network.”

Fortinet’s Whittle declined to discuss Fortinet’s strategy for any future acquisitions, but noted that the company’s $1 billion in cash and lack of debt offers flexibility. FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives — who said the Meru acquisition is a “differentiator that beefs up (Fortinet’s) suite and tangentially goes after some of that Cisco pie” — believes these types of small acquisitions are key for Fortinet to expand its customer base.

“Fortinet is doing all the right things fundamentally and this is another feather in the cap for them,” Ives wrote in an email Wednesday.

Fortinet expects the deal to close in the third quarter, and will combine the companies instead of running Meru as a separate entity. Meru reported having 381 employees, half outside the United States, at the end of 2014, during which the company lost $20.9 million, or 89 cents a share, on sales of $90.9 million.